When we first started our homeschooling journey over a quarter-century ago, one of the staples of our school day was doing critical thinking exercises. I eventually built a huge library of books by Critical Thinking Press, but the title we started out with way back when was the very first book in their Building Thinking Skills series.
After a major move six years ago, our Thinking Skills books got squirreled away in a remote closet and forgotten, so my youngest kids have not benefited from them to the extent their older siblings did.
Fortunately, those critical thinking books resurfaced when we changed houses again a few months ago (plus the folks at Timberdoodle sent me some new copies in exchange for this review), so we are back on track now, and those younger kids are eating it up.
The workbooks are designed to be consumable, but I’ve always preferred to sit with a child on either side of me and work through the exercises together — at least for the beginning books. They think through each problem and take turns pointing to the correct answer.
Thus, I’m still using many of the same books with #11 and #12 that I used with #1 and #2. Our original set looks like this, none the worse for wear:
But the Building Thinking Skills series has undergone several updates and revisions over the years, so that now the books look like this:
The basic concepts are the same, but the new version includes more exercises, an expanded scope and sequence, plus — drumroll, please — an answer key in the back of every book! That was conspicuously missing from the earlier editions, which means that if a problem stumped Mom, too, we were all out of luck. Ha!
The books use both figural and verbal problems to develop four important analytical skills: recognizing similarities/differences, completing sequences, developing classification skills, and understanding analogies.
The further you go in the series, the more detailed and complex the exercises become.
I can’t help but think all that practice on figural problems helped when it came time for our two dentists to take their DATs! The exercises in the verbal volume of Book 3 are great prep for the SAT, as well.
Visit Timberdoodle to download sample pages from any book in the Building Thinking Skills series. Each book can be purchased separately or as a component of one of their outstanding curriculum kits:
- Building Thinking Skills Beginning is part of the Preschool Curriculum Kit.
- Building Thinking Skills 1 is part of the 2nd Grade Curriculum Kit.
- Building Thinking Skills 2 is part of the 4th Grade Curriculum Kit.
- Building Thinking Skills – Figural is part of the 8th Grade Curriculum Kit.
- Building Thinking Skills – Verbal is part of the 9th Grade Curriculum Kit.
Hi Jennifer,
I have enjoyed reading your reviews on Timberdoodle. Did you use their full curriculum to teach your kids?
Hi, Lilian. We have never used Timberdoodle’s full curriculum kits for the simple reason that they didn’t offer that option back when we first began our homeschooling journey. By the time they started selling curriculum kits, we’d already graduated a couple of our kids and had pieced together a curriculum of our own that we were very happy with. That being said, at least 50-60% of the books, puzzles, games, and enrichment activities in each of Timberdoodle’s graded curriculums are products that we use and love, including Pathway Readers, Apologia Science, The Story of the World, Critical Thinking books, and many, many more. I’d say the primary difference between what Timberdoodle offers and what we’ve used is Math. Although I’ve tried Math-U-See and understand the appeal it has for lots of students, I personally prefer Saxon and have used the same beloved set of textbooks to teach math to all twelve of my kids. My husband and I also really love reading aloud to our children and have therefore integrated a lot of literature books I got through Sonlight into the curriculum we use. For more details about our family’s favorite curriculum choices, read this post.